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Be Authentic
In Heart’s Dzyer, you share some of the most intimate aspects of your relationship with your boyfriend via letters exchanged during his time in prison. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This was an important book to write because his family was grieving, and I wanted to give them something about him that they may not have known.
I appreciated the candid nature with which you share your experiences. What was the most difficult thing for you to write about?
Even though I was candid and I wrote about difficult things, I did black out some private things that I didn’t think were appropriate to be shared with everyone.
What advice would you give someone who is considering sharing their own memoir?
I would advise that person to be authentic. I kept his spelling inaccuracies because, as someone with dyslexia, it would have been inauthentic to portray him as a perfect speller.
Did you learn anything about yourself in the course of putting Heart’s Dzyer together?
I don’t know if learning is the first thing that comes to mind. If anything, my experience dredged up a lot of emotions. Some days were harder than others. Sometimes I had to take a break because I needed to process emotions. So I guess I learned that I needed to give myself time to process, and I had to be compassionate toward myself as well.
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This book is a painstakingly typewritten version of more than 193 letters written between 2011 and 2015, all typed up verbatim post-mortem. Even though I started writing to Snail in 2011, we had known of each other since 1995 because we attended the same middle school. After his death in 2023, I decided to transcribe all of his letters to me to honor the life that he lived and to give his loved ones a little piece of himself. All proceeds will go toward his family.
The Call I Almost Missed: 365 Days Without a Cell Phone and What It Taught Me About Love, Presence, and the Lies We Live
Tommy Short’s The Call I Almost Missed is a yearlong spiritual and emotional memoir told as a sequence of short letters to his daughters, and that shape gives the book its heartbeat. The premise is simple enough to hook you fast: a father turns off his cell phone for 365 days after his daughter asks, “Daddy, why are you always on your phone?” But the book quickly grows beyond experiment or stunt. It becomes a running conversation about attention, fatherhood, ambition, fear, faith, and the private ways people drift away from themselves. The letter format keeps the book intimate, and the repeated “What if” chapter titles give it a reflective rhythm that feels less like an argument and more like a man thinking out loud in real time.
What makes the book work is that Short writes with the urgency of someone who knows he’s been sleepwalking and doesn’t want to waste the wake-up call. He’s strongest when he ties his big ideas to ordinary scenes: a bedtime routine, a haircut gone sideways, a walk with his wife, a quiet panic attack, a rainy stop at the park before school. Those moments keep the book grounded. When he writes, “Presence isn’t proximity. It’s attention,” he lands on the book’s central claim in a way that feels real, not packaged. That line keeps echoing because the whole book is an effort to prove it, one family moment at a time.
The book is also a self-portrait of a man shedding identities that once made him feel valuable. Short writes about officiating basketball, speaking work, masculinity, control, and the reflex to stay reachable at all times. That gives the memoir a real arc. It isn’t just about removing a device. It’s about watching performance fall away and seeing what survives. I liked that he understands this process as both tender and disruptive. The book keeps returning to the cost of becoming more honest, especially in marriage, family life, and faith. Even when he gets intense, there’s a real vulnerability underneath it, and that’s what keeps the book from feeling abstract.
Stylistically, this is a devotional memoir with a motivational streak. Some readers will find the repetition calming; others may find it a bit much, but the repetition is part of the design. The book wants to ponder, not rush your thinking. Short’s best image for that approach comes early, when he says, “This book is not a map. Maps promise routes and destinations. But life rarely works that way.” That line explains the whole reading experience. You don’t move through this book to gather a neat system. You move through it to sit with its questions, and to notice how often it asks you to reconsider the life you’re building while you’re busy trying to manage it.
What I liked most is how clearly the book knows what it wants to be: a record of choosing presence on purpose. It’s a father’s testimony, a spiritual inventory, and a collection of letters meant to outlast the season that produced them. By the end, the phone itself almost feels secondary, which is exactly the point. The real subject is a human life becoming more awake. If you like memoirs that lean into reflection, family, and hard-won tenderness, this one has a lot to offer. It feels personal without being sealed off, and sincere without hiding its rough edges.
Pages: 294 | ASIN : B0GNX3WK9Q
Heart’s Dzyer
Heart’s Dzyer is a memoir built from more than 193 letters exchanged between author Woo-Ae Yi and her former boyfriend Snail between 2011 and 2015, then transcribed after his death in 2023. What begins as a prison pen-pal reconnection between two people who knew each other in middle school slowly opens into something stranger, riskier, and more intimate: a record of affection under surveillance, of art made in confinement, of addiction, depression, longing, manipulation, tenderness, and the way a person’s voice can outlive the body that carried it. The book moves through requests for photo enlargements and tattoo sketches, coded financial favors, flirtation, emotional collapse, private jokes, fox-and-hound imagery, and eventually the ache of loss, all while insisting on the rawness of the original letters rather than smoothing them into a cleaner memoir.
I was surprised by how alive Snail feels on the page, and how uneasy that aliveness can be. He can be lyrical one moment and coercive the next, self-deprecating and charming in the same breath. A line about a “6×9 labyrinth” gives way to instructions for mailing hidden cash; a meditation on loneliness turns into delight over stickers, cartoons, dubstep, or a glowing light box. That instability is the book’s power. Yi doesn’t sanitize him into a noble tragic figure, and I respected that. She lets the contradictions stand. I found that deeply moving, because love here isn’t sentimental at all. It’s full of care, fascination, danger, rescue fantasies, and blurred boundaries. The emotional truth comes precisely from the fact that the book refuses to turn this correspondence into something tidier than it was.
As writing, the book is rough in ways that are sometimes frustrating and often essential. The preserved misspellings, abrupt tonal swings, and sheer accumulation of letters can make the reading experience challenging. But that feels earned. Prison correspondence should not read like a polished novel. It should snag. It should circle. It should sometimes feel like being trapped in somebody else’s head. I also admired the way art keeps breaking through the prose. The requests to enlarge drawings, the graffiti pieces, the tattoo designs, the “Gentle” image caged in chain-link logic, even the odd tenderness of The Fox and the Hound references all give the relationship a visual pulse. The book’s ideas about identity, loneliness, performance, and survival aren’t laid out as arguments, but they accumulate by pressure. By the end, I felt I’d spent time not just with a doomed romance, but with a record of how people improvise meaning when freedom, time, and dignity have all been damaged.
I found Heart’s Dzyer messy, haunting, intimate, and brave. I finished it feeling tender toward both the love it preserves and the pain it refuses to disguise. This is a book I’d recommend to readers who are drawn to epistolary memoirs, prison writing, complicated love stories, and books that leave the seams showing, because those seams are the whole point.
Pages: 574 | ASIN : B0GKY4MF85
Scars and All
Scars and All is a hybrid of memoir, self-help, and conversational reflection, built around one deceptively simple idea: the wounds we carry can either keep us trapped in old pain or become a way of recognizing and easing pain in others. Lara Portelli opens with a stranger dropping milk in a Sydney supermarket, then follows that moment into a chain of encounters, most memorably with Helen at the Hydro Majestic, where a spilled carton becomes the trigger for a buried schoolyard humiliation, and later with Mia, whose mirror-bound self-loathing exposes how easily beauty standards colonize a woman’s inner life. From there, the book widens into chapters on self-harm, invisibility, dress size, cutting remarks, and visible scarring, always circling back to the same invitation: look at your scars honestly, then decide whether they’ll remain reminders or become a map forward.
Portelli writes like someone leaning across the table, saying, listen, this matters. At its best, that makes the book feel intimate in a way many books in this lane never do. Helen’s story, especially the awful convergence of guilt, self-harm, and the old humiliation of chocolate milk in her hair, has genuine force. So does the quieter ache of Mia asking whether she can “compete” with the women she sees in magazines, only to be told, beautifully and bluntly, “You don’t.” I also found the chapter on clothing size unexpectedly effective. The changing-room scene with the ruby-red dress is funny, a little chaotic, and painfully recognizable, which is exactly why it lands. The book is strongest when Portelli lets scenes breathe like that, when the ideas rise out of lived moments instead of arriving as instruction.
The writing has warmth, rhythm, and an unguarded sincerity I appreciated, even when it wanders into reflective detours. There are moments when the narrative shifts from personal storytelling into broader reflections, motivational language, and ideas around NLP, past life regression, and inherited trauma. Those sections didn’t resonate with me quite as strongly as the more intimate, lived scenes, though they still felt consistent with the book’s searching and deeply personal spirit. I trusted Portelli most when she was describing a room, a look, a humiliation, a sudden kindness, the soft light of Holly Difford’s photo shoot, or the raw fact of Turia Pitt refusing to let “5 seconds of pain and agony” define the rest of her life. I never doubted the sincerity underneath everything. The book’s moral imagination is generous. It wants people to be gentler with themselves and more alert to the hurt in others, and that conviction gives it a pulse.
Scars and All is heartfelt and genuinely affecting. I think it succeeds because Portelli is willing to be raw, personal, and earnest in service of a deeply human belief: that pain can enlarge us instead of reducing us. By the time she returns to the image of walking someone “to the safety of that dry space,” the book had earned its tenderness. I’d recommend it most to readers who like personal-development books with memoir blood in them, especially women navigating reinvention, self-worth, body image, or the long afterlife of emotional injury.
Pages: 96 | ASIN : B0FYNQG85V
The Architecture of Excellence: Habits, Virtue, and the Making of a Life Worth Judging
The Architecture of Excellence, by Craig Wright, treats a human life like a building project. Not a mood, not a vibe, a structure. The author lays out an “architecture of excellence” that ties together old-school virtue, modern habit research, and a central tool he calls the Ledger, a daily scorecard for character and conduct. Each chapter follows a clear rhythm: a vivid scene that shows drift or discipline in action, a tight explanation of the idea, a breakdown of common self-sabotage, and then concrete practices and exercises. By the end, the argument feels simple on purpose. A life you can respect comes from small, repeatable behaviours, tracked honestly, across work, health, relationships, and moral courage.
I found the writing to be sharp and controlled. The voice is firm and at times downright severe, yet it stays clear and readable. I liked the way the author weaves in Aristotle, Jordan Peterson, and Ayn Rand without slipping into academic fog or online ranting. The prose carries a lot of punchy lines and tight images, and that gave the book a steady energy that kept pulling me forward. At the same time, the intensity barely drops. The book keeps its foot on the gas, and I felt that in my body.
The structure works well. I appreciated the repeating pattern of “concept, traps, methods, exercises” because it makes the book easy to navigate and revisit. The Ledger idea is the strongest element for me. A simple grid of virtues and behaviours, filled in every day, used as a mirror for who you actually are, not who you say you are. I felt a mix of dread and excitement as I read those sections. Dread, because I could see exactly how my own patterns would look in those boxes. Excitement, because the system is practical and does not rely on hype or motivation. Some arguments get repeated in a slightly different dress. But I understand why, as repetition helps the message stick.
The book lands hard on personal responsibility, honest self-audit, and the danger of drift. That part resonated with me. I liked the claim that your “real self” is the moving average of your behaviour over time, not your feelings on a good day. The blend of virtue ethics and simple behavioural tools works better than I expected. It gives the book both weight and usability. The moral stance can be demanding. The author acknowledges hardship, but the spotlight always swings back to individual agency. The Ledger can be a strong tool for growth, and it can also become a strict inner judge if someone leans that way already.
I see this as a serious and well-built book for readers who want discipline, not comfort. I would recommend it to ambitious professionals, students standing at a crossroads, and anyone who feels stuck in vague self-improvement loops and wants something more concrete than “believe in yourself.” It will also fit people who already enjoy thinkers like Aristotle, Jordan Peterson, or Ayn Rand and want a more applied, day-to-day framework. If you want someone to look you in the eye and say, “Here is what a life of excellence would actually require from you,” The Architecture of Excellence will be worth your time.
Pages: 86 | ASIN : B0GDQS5SJ5
A Tragic Character
Black Sheep follows a woman living through abuse who flees to London and rebuilds her life, only to realize the past follows you and she has to confront the ghosts that left with her. Were there particular real-life influences behind the novel?
No, the story just came to me, I think because it was my desire to create a tragic character so that I could save her, in fiction.
Gem feels intensely real. How did you balance vulnerability and toughness in her character?
I think there is a part of Gem in all of us, and I chose a strong constitution in someone rather than a ‘lay down and die’ response, maybe to give hope.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Counseling was a very important theme, having experienced therapy and part training to be a counselor, in the past, which gave me some knowledge and enabled me to picture the scenes with Gem and her therapist. Relationships were also high on the list, as we all have expectations of people that often fail. And I suppose I explored my own reactions, e.g., with school friends.
What does Black Sheep say about identity after trauma?
That life experience shapes you as a person, especially with trust. Whatever you go through stays with you forever, but I wrote with a positive outlook, as I didn’t want Gem to be defined by her past, but rather to learn from it and move on.
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She eventually finds a career, love and the comfort of stability, none of which can erase a torturous past and the underlying bitterness gnawing at her tender soul.
A brush with the mystical brings change, as an unlikely guardian watches from the sidelines, infusing her thoughts and decisions by psychological transference. The dark, influential encounter guides her to a gratifying finale where she must compromise what is right to settle a long-awaited score.
Waves of Light and Darkness
Waves of Light and Darkness is a short story collection that circles big, tender questions, then keeps circling them from different angles: grief, desire, family duty, fear, and the stubborn need to make meaning even when life feels random or unfair. The book moves between intimate relationship dramas and more metaphysical turns, story by story. One early piece, “The Yellow Butterfly,” sets the tone: a widowed astrophysicist is knocked off balance by loss and then pulled into an uncanny encounter that feels half therapy, half dream, half cosmic riddle.
What I kept noticing, in a good way, is how Danenbarger writes feelings as physical states. A room gets too quiet. A routine becomes a trap. A conversation turns into a tight knot you can feel in your chest. Even when the stories lean surreal, the emotional footing is very human, like when that grieving scientist can’t decide if he’s being helped or manipulated, and either possibility hurts. The prose likes to linger on atmosphere, the smell of a place, the small habits people use to stay upright. Sometimes it’s almost cinematic. You can hear the café, feel the late-night glow, and then, suddenly, you’re somewhere stranger.
I also got the sense that the author is deliberately mixing “real life” tension with the itch of bigger ideas. One moment you’re watching people play social games at a fancy event, the next you’re hearing characters talk like reality itself might be bending. That blend can be compelling. It can also be a little blunt at times to make sure you do not miss the point. I respected the ambition. The stories keep asking: what do we cling to when certainty falls apart? In “Fragments of Existence,” a father’s sense of purpose snaps into focus while his kids are literally suspended above him on a ride, and it’s simple and sharp, like a truth you did not realize you were avoiding.
If you like literary short fiction with existential, occasionally speculative edges, this will probably land for you. It sits in the neighborhood of writers like George Saunders or Ted Chiang in the sense that the stories use unusual premises to press on ordinary human nerves, though Danenbarger’s voice is more earnest and romantic than wry. And it makes sense that he describes his own lane as “existential literary fiction.” Read this if you enjoy character-driven stories that are willing to get philosophical without turning cold.
Pages: 308 | ASIN : B0GFXPT5KM
Balance Between Closeness and Cost
Framed in Love follows a man who, after a lightning strike, has the ability to step inside a fading painting where he falls in love with a woman trapped inside it. What was the first spark behind the idea of stepping into a painting?
The story started with an actual painting that I own. The date of the painting is 1858; it is of a Victorian woman who has a striking resemblance to my wife. So, I thought, if I wanted to know this woman, how could I get to know her? I would have to enter the painting to strike up a conversation. Hence, the lightning strike, because there is something mysterious about lightning.
How did David evolve as you wrote the book?
I introduced the twist that the painting fades each time David enters. I did that for a reason. David, with the help of Abby, sees himself differently. Instead of viewing love as something risky or temporary, he begins to see it as transformative and grounding. Earlier in the story, David often reacts to situations emotionally or defensively. As his bond with Abby deepens, he becomes more intentional by choosing honesty over avoidance and commitment over uncertainty.
The book explores love as both connection and sacrifice. What drew you to that tension?
What drew me to that tension is that love rarely feels pure or simple in real life. Love is almost always a balance between closeness and cost. In Framed in Love, the relationship between David and Abby works because it recognizes that loving someone deeply often means giving something up: control, certainty, or even parts of the version of yourself you’ve carefully built.
What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the book?
The most compelling love stories (to me) live in that uncomfortable middle space. Too much connection without sacrifice feels shallow. Too much sacrifice without connection feels destructive. I wanted readers to feel that push-and-pull. The fear of losing yourself versus the desire to belong, because that’s what makes emotional stakes feel real.
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